Researchers say they may have found a slave ship dating back to the 19th century off the Brazilian coast in the sea of Angra dos Reis. Scientists from the AfrOrigens Institute, the Fluminense Federal University, the Federal University of Sergipe, and multiple North American research institutions believe that the findings correspond to the sunken vessel known as the Camargo, which belonged to the notorious American trader Nathaniel Gordon.
In the early 1850s, during the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Gordon was asked to helm the Brig Camargo from San Francisco to New York. He stole the vessel and sailed to Mozambique, where historical documents indicate that he carried approximately 500 enslaved African people to a clandestine port in the Angra dos Reis bay, west of Rio de Janeiro. There, he is believed to have purposely sunk the ship to cover up his tracks during a Navy search.
Although Brazil officially outlawed slavery in 1888, section five of a US 1820 piracy law made engaging in the trade a crime punishable by death. Still, many American shipowners and merchants continued to illegally trade enslaved people of African descent well through the early- and mid-19th century.
In 1862, Gordon was executed in New York for violating the piracy law, which made him the only American to be fully tried, convicted, and executed for such an act.
“Of the 12 million enslaved Africans brought to the New World, almost half — 5.5 million people —were forcibly taken to Brazil as early as 1540 and until the 1860s,” reads a research page from Princeton University’s Brazil LAB project. “This reality was buttressed by a deliberate effort at ‘whitening’ Brazilian society through various state-sponsored immigration projects and frontier colonization plans throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.”
To members of the Quilombo Santa Rita do Bracuí community in Angra dos Reis, some of whom are descendants of enslaved African people, the possible identification of the Camargo shipwreck signifies an important acknowledgment.
“They took our people, Africans, from the other side of the Atlantic and brought them here, and that’s why we are here today and claim this land as a Quilombo community,” local Emerson Luiz Ramos said in a video about the project produced by AfrOrigens. “Finding [the ship] is a denunciation that says that the Atlantic Slave Trade was forbidden and Brazil allowed this slave trade.”
Filmmaker and co-founder of AfrOrigens Yuri Sanada, who is also currently developing a feature-length documentary about Gordon’s trials and the search for the Camargo, told Hyperallergic in an email that researchers are still identifying the actual wreck, as the vessel’s body is buried under a few feet of mud.
“Our plan is to remove the mud in the next phase, in October, so we’ll see most of what is down there,” Sanada said.
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